In an effort to get “back in the game” for briefings with interesting mobile start-ups, this week I had the chance to catch up with Trover cofounder and CEO Jason Karas about some new features.
If you haven’t heard of it yet, Trover is a local discovery app built around geotagged images. It was founded by …

As part of the information overload that is Facebook’s long awaited S-1 filing, the company announced it is up to 845 million active global users (defined as monthly users). That’s a 39 percent year-over-year jump.
That total has slowly been creeping up; can you remember the user count on “The Social Network” movie poster? Also creeping …

In the immediate wake of our report on Google mobile ad revenues, TechCrunch reports today that the search giant saw a 2x year-over-year increase in mobile search ad requests (the largest source of its mobile ad revenues) in 2011.
Our friend Surojit Chatterjee, Google’s lead product manager for mobile search ads, attributes this growth to the …

Throughout 2012, we’re beefing up our editorial pipeline to get more reports out, on a more frequent basis. This is especially true in mobile, where there is such a great deal of activity and data coming out of the quickly growing space.
It’s also a New Year’s resolution of sorts to do a better job summarizing …

As you probably heard, Apple today announced first-quarter earnings (its first fiscal quarter is Sept.-Dec.). And you probably also heard that it was a blowout quarter — beating even the most aggressive analyst estimates.
Here are the main bullets. More important, I’ve included below a few factoids put together by MG Seigler at TechCrunch that put …

I just heard from our friends at WillowTree Apps about their most recent iPhone app, “Likes.” Utilizing the growing number of Facebook Likes out there, it will look at your friends’ and friends of friends’ activity and make local recommendations accordingly.
It’s an interesting idea, and well within the growing trend of social sharing that we …

Following Peter’s post about the developing lineup for our upcoming ILM East conference, we recently shot some video to give a little more color on what we’re in the process of building.
Below are the first two. We’ll shoot more videos over the coming weeks that feature perspectives of more analysts and local media coverage areas. …

Foursquare announced today that it has partnered with SinglePlatform to add Menus to its Explore tab. The Explore tab, as many of you know, allows users to discover places around them — as governed by check-in history, social behavior and other data Foursquare continues to beef up.
Menus is a logical step and makes Foursquare more …

Millennial Media has become the latest to join the recent resurgence of tech IPOs. Or at least it has taken its first big step in that direction by filing its S-1 with the SEC, according to an email I just received from my contact there.
As the filing states, Millennial’s revenues were almost $70 million in …

During a late morning panel on Day 2 of ILM West, local video providers batted around the opportunity in bringing video advertising to the “other 99 percent” of small merchants.
“We know it’s evolving,” said moderator Steve Passwaiter of this democratization of video ads. “Once a television-laden experience has migrated to desktop and is now going …

In the midst of ILM West happenings, call measurement ad provider Telmetrics announced today that it’s bringing its m.Call platform to iOS.
M.Call gives local search publishers and app developers the ability to capture data around the phone calls they’re generating. Notably it does this without the need for traditional call tracking numbers.
This works with both …

Day 1 at ILM West came to a close with a session on how SMBs are using Facebook and social media. This most notably culminated with “3 big ideas” for driving social commerce, from Oodle CEO Craig Donato.
These are derived from Oodle’s work powering Facebook’s own Marketplace, and other things the company has done that are tantamount …

Today at BIA/Kelsey’s ILM West conference, prolific Wall Street Journal tech blogger Kara Swisher acknowledged many of the challenges for local media, but was quick to point out that none of these is new.
Some of the sleeping giants moving more and more into local — like Facebook, eBay and Amazon — she argues aren’t sleepers …

In the run-up to any given BIA/Kelsey conference, I’m continually asked about the makeup of our typical audience. This is a good question from both attendees and speakers trying to devise the proper tone for their presentations or prepared panel fodder.
The answer is that it’s a rich bus dev environment with lots of high-level decision …

There’s a growing crop of mobile ad networks specializing in local ad inventory and location-based ad placements. This is a subcategory of larger, more broadly defined ad networks like AdMob and Millennial.
The idea is that this targeting provides better relevance and performance, which lead to higher ad premiums and eCPMs. We see evidence everywhere, and …

As we do every year across BIA/Kelsey’s coverage areas, our analysts put their heads together in cross-disciplinary fashion to handicap the 2012 local media space.
It’s a solid exercise and great preparation for our ILM West conference less than two weeks away. Many of these predictions will come out then, and extensive category-specific reports are …

Amazon has just debuted an iPad and Kindle Fire app that lets kids create holiday wish lists. Known as Amazon Santa, it has intuitive functionality and a fun design to create lists and share them with parents, relatives and of course Santa.
This is really just Amazon’s longstanding wish list, but takes advantage of the tablet …

We’re less than two weeks from our big ILM West conference in San Francisco, and the agenda continues to get stronger.
On day 3 of the conferfence, we’ll be doing things slightly different by devoting the day to discussions about Social, Local and Mobile media (the SoLoMo topic you’ve likely heard a great deal about lately).
We’ll …

I’ve been travelling internationally so I’m late to this news. But it’s worth mentioning that xAd has joined the ranks of ad networks that produce reports on their network activity. We’ve seen these from the likes of Millennial, and more recently from the local networks like Verve and JiWire.
The inaugural report affirms what we’ve known …

Last week I had the chance to talk to Goodzer founder Dmitry Pakhomkin in advance of the product’s official nationwide launch today. It’s also now available both online and as an iOS app.
The local product search app enters a space that has some solid competition and early movers such as TheFind, Krillion/Local.com, NearbyNow and Milo. …